Centrist Splinters and Legislative Leverage

New York is a pretty Democratic state. There’s something like a 2-1 Democratic registration advantage. The vote in Presidential elections is predictably lopsided. We’ve got a popular Democratic Governor, and two Democratic Senators. Our House delegation is overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) Democratic. And the Republican Party’s fortunes keep dropping. Their last bastion of power, until recently, was the State Senate. Then they lost that.

Or so it seemed. Now, they’ve been brought back from the dead by a group of Independent Democrats, who have formed a coalition with the Republicans to keep the Senate out of exclusively Democratic hands:

With the new coalition, the leaders of the Republican and the Independent Democratic conferences would have “joint and equal authority” over bills that the Senate takes up, committee assignments, appointments and state budget negotiations. Albany’s famous “three men in a room” — the governor, the Assembly speaker and the Senate majority leader, who negotiate the state budget and major legislation — would become a quartet.

Mr. Skelos and Mr. Klein would also take turns, alternating every two weeks as temporary president of the Senate, a position defined in the State Constitution that is next in the gubernatorial line of succession after the lieutenant governor.

In an interview, Mr. Klein said Senate Republicans had committed to allowing floor votes on a number of critical measures for which Democrats had unsuccessfully pushed when Republicans had an outright majority.

“Working with the governor and our colleagues, I know that we will pass some major progressive reforms, such as an increase to the minimum wage, a reform of stop-and-frisk and serious campaign finance reform,” Mr. Klein said. “I’m extremely confident that these issues will come to the Senate floor for a vote and I fully expect them to pass the Senate.”

Basically, by bolting from their party, this handful of Democrats have gained control of the Senate. The Republicans can’t piss them off, or they’ll just go back home to their original party, leaving the Republicans with no power at all. And the Democrats can’t punish them unless they achieve such a massive victory at the polls that they achieve a majority without counting the defectors. Meanwhile, with this much leverage, they should be able to take very good care of their own constituencies, assuring that they don’t have to worry about personally losing an election.

And Governor Cuomo seems perfectly happy with this outcome, and for good reason. On the one hand, it means the Republicans will have to agree to anything that gets passed – which makes it harder for them to attack him. On the other hand, it means he doesn’t have to play bad cop restraining the more extravagant impulses of his own party – he can get the Republican Senate to do that for him. Either way, he wins.

I’m surprised we don’t see more of this kind of behavior in states that are politically far from the national median. In you’re in an elastic state like New Hampshire or Colorado, the odds are the parties are going to rotate in power, so there are multiple opportunities to punish defectors and a limited amount of leverage to be gained by forming a centrist splinter group – and considerable advantage to playing the role of a loyal partisan. But where a state leans heavily toward one-party rule in the legislature, backbenchers have little opportunity for advancement, and a centrist breakaway group could have considerable leverage.

Of course, it only works if the minority party knows it’s going to remain in the minority essentially forever, and is therefore willing to settle for moderating the majority’s tendencies rather than opposing them outright in the hopes of setting the agenda after a future election that brings them to power. But isn’t that a reasonable description of reality for, say, the California Republican Party?

Parties are vehicles for identity-expression. That’s why these Independent Democrats are still calling themselves Democrats, in coalition with Republicans, rather than just switching to the Republican Party. They’re just sufficiently self-interested and/or public-spirited to be willing to break party discipline to form a cross-party coalition. But isn’t that also a reasonable description of the centrist wing of, say, the California Democratic Party?

Obviously, every legislature and every state is a unique snowflake, but I’m still curious why we don’t see more of this kind of behavior in states as dominated by a single party as New York is. It’s part and parcel of my puzzlement that third parties always seem more enthusiastic about the long-shot of capturing the Executive, when there would seem to be lower-hanging fruit running for the legislature.

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4 Responses to Centrist Splinters and Legislative Leverage

I’m still curious why we don’t see more of this kind of behavior in states as dominated by a single party as New York is

But Republicans had a lock on the State Senate for decades until this past election, and a fairly popular three-term Republican governor before 2007. Only now does it look like the Republicans have entered long-term minority status in the State Senate, so now you are seeing factionalism among the Senate Democrats.

As to the NY Assembly, dominated by Democrats since the 70s, we have indeed seen some intraparty Democratic factionalism there. In 2000, the caucus majority leader, an upstater named Michael Bragman, led an attempted coup against longtime Speaker Sheldon Silver (from the Lower East Side). After the coup’s failure, Bragman and his supporters, to a man, saw their political careers obliterated. Haven’t seen any renegades rise anew since then.

Large urban states, NY and CA most obviously, are expensive for campaigning, and require a lot of activist support and ring-kissing to climb the political ladder.

In the days of the one-party Democratic South, there were often fierce intraparty battles between “Bourbons” favored by large landowners and populists (think “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman or Huey Long), but those were the days before mass electronic media, when an insurgent could run a “friends and neighbors” campaign on a shoestring and (sometimes) overcome powerful interests. There was also, almost needless to say, the perennial race issue, giving populists an always handy torch to light the anger of poorer whites.

Now, with a number of southern states becoming one-party Republican, you are not likely to see dissident Republicans in legislatures side with the minority Democrats because the latter are, well, minority Democrats (in both senses of the term “minority”); the social/ideological gap would just be too great to form a workable coalition.

As for CA, don’t forget that until this last election, the minority GOP had veto power over the budget because of the state’s two-thirds rule, so they had enough leverage without cutting deals with dissident Democrats.

Alaska has had such a situation in its state Senate, with Democrats joining moderate Republicans to form the “Bipartisan Majority Working Group” which held power for six years, from 2006 through 2012.

But in the 2012 elections, several Democrats lost, and the Senate will be under GOP majority control going forward. Predictably, several of the “bipartisan” Republicans will lose their prime committee seats as the state party retaliates for their bipartisanship.

I once posted something in soc.history.what-if noting that in contrast to the US Congress (where even the most conservative Democrats would vote for a liberal Democrat for Speaker of the House, and even the most liberal Republicans would vote for a conservative Republican for Speaker–simply because they were the choices of the party caucus)

“the interesting thing is that this has not always been true of state legislatures. In several cases, Republicans, while a minority in the House, have shown their power by joining with dissident Democrats to elect a conservative Democrat as Speaker; in other cases, Democrats, while a minority in the House, have shown their power by joining with dissident
Republicans to elect a liberal (or at least moderate) Republican Speaker.” I gave examples from Arizona, California, Tennessee, and Texas.

Just to the south, Republican Chris Christie is governing as a moderate Northeastern(ish) Republican by splitting up the democrats. He’s buddy buddy with the Adubato family, a key Dem powerbroker. And it’s working, at least in the sense that he quietly gets his way with a Democrat legislature after grandstanding against them.